The field of the invention is containers or boxes, and the invention relates more particularly to boxes for shipping and displaying beverages.
Most beverage cases hold a plurality of beverage bottles in a vertical position, each bottle being separated from an adjacent bottle by a corrugated cardboard layer. While such containers have reached a high degree of design refinement and enable shipping with a minimum of breakage in a container of relatively low cost, such containers are deficient when a product such as wine reaches the retail outlet. After the cover of the wine case has been removed, only the top of the wine bottles are visible and prospective purchasers are not able to view the side of the bottle or the bottle label to assist them in choosing a wine. Furthermore, many wines are stoppered with a cork wich is preferably kept moist and therefore it is preferred that wine be shipped and stored in a position which retains the cork in a moist condition.
While wooden wine cases have been utilized for many years to ship and support wine bottles in a horizontal position, attempts to duplicate such wooden containers from corrugated particle board have been unsuccessful to date in that bottle breakage has occurred at an unacceptably high rate. Another difficulty associated particularly with the wine industry is that different sizes and shapes of wine bottles are used with different generic types of wine. Thus, the typical burgundy bottle is shorter than the typical rhine wine bottle. Since it is common for a single winery to produce and bottle wines in both burgundy and rhine wine style bottles, there is a need to provide a single container which is capable of shipping and displaying bottles of different sizes.